Great Falls founder Paris Gibson made an unsuccessful pitch in the 1893 Montana Legislature for the new state to place a single-unit university in his city.

He even offered the state free land along the Missouri River where the Meadow Lark Country Club now is located and a sizable cash endowment, according to Montana State historians Michael Malone and Richard Roeder.

But, the historians recounted in their 1976 book, “Montana: A History of Two Centuries,” legislators rejected Gibson’s “lucrative and sensible offer” of a Great Falls site and instead created a four unit-system, “to gratify several ambitious cities and keep hard feelings to a minimum.”

Missoula received the university, Bozeman an agricultural college, Butte a school of mines and Dillon a normal college, or school to train teachers. And Great Falls was shut out.

By late 1919, Gibson sold the 248 acres on the south side of the Sun River near where it joined the Missouri River to the founders of the Meadow Lark Country Club for $47,500. At the time observers called it “the finest site and soil for a golf course.”

But, we wonder, what kind of university campus could that forested shore land have made? And how would the nature of Great Falls, Missoula and Bozeman have changed if lawmakers had placed a single-unit university system in Great Falls?

It’s impossible to pin down a hypothetical, but in 2014, as Montanans look both backward and forward on the 125th anniversary of Montana’s becoming a state in November 1899, it’s fun to ponder “what if.”

The Tribune asked a couple of Montana historians and two thoughtful former elected officials to evaluate what could have been.

“If Great Falls had landed the state’s single college, it would have grown steadily and probably have become the biggest city in Montana,” said Harry Fritz, a history professor emeritus at the University of Montana.

“Great Falls would have had everything going for it,” Fritz said.

It would have meant adding the makings of what would become a major university with 20,000 students, professors and support staff to what the Electric City already had going for it: hydro power from Missouri River dams that attracted industry, including the Anaconda Co. coppery refinery in Black Eagle, plus being situated well as a trade center for bountiful surrounding wheat farms.

“Missoula and Bozeman wouldn’t have had much,” he added.

“Missoula was primarily a railroad and timber town until well past World War II when the university and other businesses began to grow,” Fritz said. “Without the university, Missoula would be a backwater town. Nor would Bozeman have seen much growth, without MSU and the later high-tech and agricultural developments that followed it. What would Bozeman have been become? Maybe a ranch and ski town.”

“That’s the main reason why the early legislators wanted to spread state institutions around, to give several towns something to build around,” Fritz said.

Legislators also cited the combined issue of distance and access to college, which Fritz said was a pretty good argument for more colleges in the early 1890s, but less important soon as more roads and rail lines were developed.

“The possibility of consolidating the university system into one or two colleges always remained a possibility, but never occurred,” Fritz said.

In fact, the issue was placed on the 1914 ballot whether to consolidate what were then four units into a single university at either Missoula or Bozeman.

The measure failed overwhelmingly, by a 60 to 40 percent margin. Some 73 percent of Missoula County voters supported consolidation, while 92 of Gallatin County voters rejected it, Fritz said, “because Bozeman residents felt the ‘fix was in,’ ” with Missoula expected to be chosen as the single college.”

Great Falls historian Ken Robison agreed a single university would have benefited Great Falls at the expense of Missoula and Bozeman, but is not as kind to Paris Gibson as the MSU historians were.

Robison said Gibson long had planned to put a university in Great Falls; the site south of the Missouri near the mouth of the Sun River was so designated on the original land survey of Great Falls he had drawn up in 1883.

“But Paris Gibson blew it by insisting Great Falls get the single unit-university,” Robison said. “At one point in the 1893 legislative session, a key Missoula legislator offered Gibson the option of Great Falls receiving the agricultural college and Missoula the university.”

“Gibson made the mistake of turning the offer down, and Great Falls ended up not getting any state institutions. It was sheer folly on his part. When you have a chance of getting half of something major and you end up with nothing, you have really let your community down.”

Great Falls, in the heart of the Golden Triangle grain growing region and near ranching, would have been an ideal spot to place the agricultural college, Robison added.

“How different Great Falls would have been today if it had what became Montana State University, specializing not only in agriculture but also engineering and technology,” he said.

Initially, the state agricultural college would have meant more prestige but only a modest increase in jobs and students, Robison said, but in the last 60 years the Electric City would have experienced significant growth related to the agricultural and engineering schools. The universities at Missoula and Bozeman really started growing in the second half of the 20th century, nearly quadrupling enrollments, he said.

“And in recent years MSU-Bozeman has kept increasing enrollment because many critical high-paying jobs and high-tech spinoff industries are in the engineering and technology fields the school offers,” Robison said. “Meanwhile enrollment at UM in Missoula, which emphasizes liberal arts and a few professional schools, is dropping off.”

Bozeman probably would have remained a ranching community serving the Gallatin Valley and not grown into a prosperous city without the high-tech development and agriculture spinoffs that came with the college, which was designated a university in 1964, he said.

“Even without the state university, Missoula might have grown more than Bozeman, because it had timber development and mining nearby and both were labor intensive early on,” Robison said.

Both Fritz and Robison believe Great Falls still would have become home to military installations, even if it had become a major college town.

Both noted that Great Falls was situated in a good place from which to ferry planes and other military goods to World War II ally Russia via Canada and Alaska in the 1940s, when a military base was placed first on Gore Hill and later moved east of Great Falls to present-day Malmstrom Air Force Base.

After the war, Great Falls had favorable traits as the Air Force sought sites to place fighter and bomber units in active duty and Guard bases, Robison said. It was near wide open range land that was away from the mountains for training flights, had many clear, sunny days for flying, chinook winds to ward off winter snow in the winter and was a big enough city to provide support services.

“Regardless of where the universities were situated, Great Falls would have been attractive to the military for placing installations, from World War II on,” he said.

Fritz said prominent U.S. Sen. Mike Mansfield might not have lobbied so hard in the late 1950s to place land-based nuclear missiles at Malmstrom if Great Falls had been a thriving college town, but noted the ICBMs had to go somewhere and were placed in rural areas of North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana.

Robison agreed.

“Missile bases were built in rural states near communities with the resources to serve them, so Great Falls was a logical site,” he said.

“But if Great Falls had ended up as a combined liberal arts and agricultural university, there likely would have been a lot more people lined up at those Easter antiwar protests held for several years in the 1970s outside Malmstrom’s front gate,” Robison added.

Former Montana Secretary of State Bob Brown and Great Falls civic leader Arlyne Reichert each stressed what might have happened to the major cities culturally had the early legislators approved Gibson’s plan to anoint Great Falls with the university and bypass Missoula and Bozeman.

“A university brings a certain culture to a town,” said Brown, a former Whitefish legislator with degrees from both MSU and UM. “Missoula reflects that greatly with its respect for intellectual thought and more liberal viewpoint. Bozeman, with more emphasis on agricultural study, has a culture and politics more similar to the rest of Montana.”

Both cities benefited educationally, with closer access to classes; culturally, with more lectures and concerts; and especially in recent decades, economically, with a bigger state pay roll, and a more stable job base, he said.

“Obviously, those are some of the reasons why Paris Gibson wanted to bring a university to his community,” Brown said.

Brown thinks if Great Falls had landed the only state university, “it would have become a much bigger city, with more cultural, educational and economic opportunity, but still would have felt the influence of being a farm trade center.”

“It’s hard to imagine Missoula without the university,” Brown said, and the town “would be in deep economic difficulty these days if it continued to depend primarily on the sagging timber industry. Bozeman would be mostly a ranching community, not nearly as large and with far fewer economic opportunities.”

Reichert, a former state legislator and delegate to the 1972 Montana Constitutional Convention, first came to Great Falls in 1945 when her Montana-born husband Rick was transferred to the Great Falls base. The easterner grew to love Great Falls’ unique character.

“Being the state’s only university certainly would have changed the nature of Great Falls at least somewhat,” she said. “Academia always does in part because universities draw learned professors and students from all over the world.”

“But by serving area farmers, agriculture still would have been a major component to the community’s personality,” Reichert said. “And Great Falls still would have been a working community, with the big refinery in Black Eagle drawing immigrant workers. And the military likely would have placed a base here, too. Great Falls could have had a fascinating mix of agricultural, labor, military, professional and academic folks.”

“Adding the academic programs and economic spinoffs now occurring in Bozeman and Missoula would have been a big boost to Great Falls,” she said. “It could have become a metropolis, easily Montana’s biggest city, maybe the size of Spokane or bigger.”

Reichert, who has led the effort to preserve the historic 10th Street Bridge, added an appropriate and humorous ending to this speculative piece.

“It’s hard to contemplate what didn’t occur,” she said. “It didn’t happen, so it’s just water under the bridge.”